Today’s new feature is pulled straight from the eduFire idea board: Sortable Tutors. What we’ve done is added several links to the top of the tutors display so you can sort by:

• Featured
• Online Now
• Top Rated
• By Price
• Time Zone

I’d like to extend our thanks to Liz, one of our students for so succinctly requesting this and describing it clearly.

We also released a partial fix to a call for More Profile Info.

But What about My Feature …

Just to address a question that I expect will come up, the order in which we address these isn’t always strictly most votes / highest ranked. Sometimes its going to fall victim to engineering realities. Both of these features really fall into the “low hanging fruit” category — small enough to get done in an afternoon. Jared and I knocked out a bunch of bugs this morning and then needed to pick something that was self contained enough to be doable. No favoritism here to Liz; just being practical.

eduFire’s latest feature is, admittedly, a small one but one that shows our committment to listening to our users and taking direction from them. Why what am I talking about, well the Ideas Board:

What the ideas board gives you, the eduFire user, is a way to tell us what features you want (the ideas) and then let the overall eduFire community rank those features and comment on them. Here’s a same feature from Tina, one of our students:

What Tina has asked for is more search features and given us details as to how she wants them to work. Now we, the eduFire team, can also see that its rated as 4 stars and has (currently) 2 votes for it. We can also see any comments that other users have on it. This is a huge win for us because while everyone usually says they want every feature possible, we can see how important those features are to the community as a whole based on the amount of interaction (comments, votes and ratings) a feature has.

Kudos to Matt Mullenweg
I’d like to extend a thank you to Matt over at Wordpress for giving us an awesome model of an idea board to start from (note — I suspect Matt didn’t personally write the WordPress idea board and this is really a thank you to be transferred to someone else). Thanks man.

*Chime*

That’s right.  You’ll now hear a chime when you use eduFire and a student requests a session, sends an instant message to you or requests an introduction.  When we released Instant Sessions, well, yesterday, the first thing our teachers said to us was “Make the notifications more apparent”.  Hm… Well lets review what a notification looks like:

And this really illustrates a key difference between how users think and engineers make assumptions.  Jared and I looked at this as “well the buttons are big; heck actually enormous, how can we make them more apparent”.  Our founder, Jon, however made it very clear:

Make it audible!!!

And now you’ve got audio notifications for both teachers and students.  Enjoy.  Our thanks to our users for suggesting this and Jon for helping make it clear.

Traditionally — as far any startup can use that word when they’re less than a full year old — eduFire has always been “schedule based”. What I mean by that is, until now, using eduFire meant a process something like this:

1. Go onto the site.
2. Find a teacher.
3. Propose (i.e. schedule) a session with them by specifying when you were available to learn.
4. If that time didn’t work for the teacher then respond to the time that worked for the teacher by either indicating yes you are available then or counter proposing a time.
5. Repeat step #4 a few times perhaps.
6. Join the session with your teacher when that time rolls around.

Sure it works but that’s a whole lot of steps to follow when all you want to do is learn Spanish from Marco. To address this, *drum roll please* we are delighted to respond to your requests and announce:

Here’s how this all works:

The teacher’s profile page now incorporates two new buttons:

• Get Introduced
• Do a Session Now

The Get Introduced button lets you take a free, 10 minute, no obligation trial of a teacher and determine if they are the right teacher for you. During this introduction you have a full video session with the teacher along with text chat and its designed to give you a feel for the teacher. At the end of the session you can even roll into a full session with the teacher.
The Do a Session Now button lets you jump right into a session with a teacher and begin learning right away.
After either Get Introduced or Do a Session Now you’ll see a screen something like this:

From this screen you can choose what subject to be tutored in and wait to see if your teacher is available:

Now when a teacher is available you’ll see this screen:

If you click on the Get Introduced link then you’ll end up in a video chat with your teacher:

And there you go — instant sessions!
Note: If you’re using the Do a Session Now link then things follow a similar procession.

Note: This post is written by Scott Johnson, one of the people behind the engineering driving eduFire. He’ll show up here more and more as we start blogging about our new features.
A new feature you’ll find on eduFire is our just launched instant messaging. With our instant messaging feature you can:

• See whenever a teacher is online
• Send them a question instantly
• Arrange times for future sessions interactively — “Is next tuesday @ 10 good for you” instead of going back and forth proposing and counter proposing a session
• Pass documents back and forth with your teacher

Here’s some screenshots to show how this works:

Teachers or students online now are indicated with a green box around their profile picture.

To chat with someone select the Invite to Chat link.

Here you are in the chat room talking with your teacher or student.

And if you’re on eduFire but need to control your availability because you have an upcoming session and don’t want to be instant messaged then you can always set yourself to invisible. Teachers also have an additional setting, Ready to Teach, to explicitly indicate when they’re ready for teaching and taking on clients.

Very early on with eduFire we set the intention to only grapple with extremely meaningful problems. We set out to do something very challenging and yet very meaningful: Revolutionize education. There are a million other things we could have done and to be honest a lot of roads that would be have been “easier” depending on how you define success (be it raising money, getting acquired, etc.). However, that didn’t have much appeal to us. Instead we want to take a really big swing and try to shake an industry to its core in the hopes that something much better would emerge on the other end. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do with eduFire.

Umair has a great post up on the HBS blog which I think everyone who’s an entrepreneur or a VC needs to read. In it he takes issue with the incrementalism that he sees coming out of the Valley.

But today’s revolutionaries are sheep in wolves’ clothing. They’re lost in the economically meaningless, in the utterly trivial, in the strategically banal: mostly, they’re cutting deals with one another to…try and sell more ads. That is, when they’re not too busy partying.

I gotta say it…Umair’s dead on. Instead of looking for the New New Thing that could revolutionize the *fill in the blank* industry it seems that a lot of people are instead looking for the New New Alert Thingy. You now, that service that aggregates all of my friend aggregators which in turn aggregates all of my friend feeds that aggregate all of the things that my friends do on all of the social networks that aggregate all of my friends…

I agree with Umair that there’s something more out there that we’re missing. Our time has an opportunity cost which is that the time spent on the trivial and banal is not time spent on meaningful innovation and creative disruption. In a world with so many (real) problems to solve my concern is that so many young, creative, ambitious people are chasing after stuff that while cute and cuddly perhaps doesn’t solve these real problems.

Maybe we have the luxury to not worry about food and education and energy and health. Maybe those problems will take care of themselves.

But maybe not. Maybe we’ll all look back one day and see that we spent way too much of our time focused on the stuff that didn’t matter and not nearly enough time focused on the stuff that did. As Tony Robbins puts it, maybe we’ll realize that we “majored in minor things.”

And that I fear is indeed the real Serious Business at hand.